Tech X has been on fire since OpenAI dropped o1.

The Battle has Just Begun

The future of the developer environment on GitHub, according to Dohmke, is AI-native, demonstrating how Copilot powers OpenAI’s o1. This includes Copilot Workspace and Copilot Chat. However, no updates have been revealed for the VS Code editor. For now, Cursor is the preferred tool among developers because of its adaptable nature.

The implementation of o1 within Cursor Composer and the creation of apps have already begun in the interim. Cursor is a clone of Visual Studio Code that allows for greater flexibility in integrating language learning modules, which makes it perfect for multiple developers.

Taking it a step further, some developers have also started installing GitHub Copilot on Cursor, importing all the VS Code extensions. The reason is to use GitHub Copilot’s auto completion as Cursor’s credits are over, which seems like it is now a backup option for several developers.

Devin’s creator, Cognition Labs, worked closely with OpenAI over the last few weeks to evaluate OpenAI o1’s reasoning capabilities with Devin. They found that the new series of models represents a significant improvement for agentic systems that deal with code. Combining this with Cursor is an upgrade for several developers.

Though the categories of both the software are different, the competition now seems to be head-on between Cursor and GitHub Copilot as both can run on o1, which according to developers, is currently performing better than Claude in certain use cases.

When it comes to building apps, Cursor + Claude is still a powerhouse. Moreover, Claude Artifacts have been widely adopted by everyone now, and OpenAI’s o1 is capable of that. This makes the battle intense.

VS Code can Save GitHub Copilot or Mark the End of It

Microsoft is not shy of giving developers what they want. The company has quickly started offering OpenAI’s o1 on Azure, which is what many developers were looking for (open source would have been better). “Not sure if Microsoft can truly comprehend the true footprint of VSCode,” said Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google.

People have been figuring out ways to make the stale VS Code better by integrating GitHub Copilot, but that was quickly marked redundant when Cursor was launched, and now integrating the o1 API on Cursor makes the case for GitHub Copilot and VS Code even worse.

Seems like OpenAI’s bet on offering the API instead of just the chat version of o1 came as a double-edged sword for Microsoft and GitHub, as the AI coding tools can easily integrate the new model to better themselves.

Cursor’s coding and AI capabilities should be a wake up call for Microsoft to make VS Code integration with GitHub Copilot a lot easier. But according to internal reports, Harald Kirschner, project manager at VS Code, has been keeping an eye on Cursor and the team is keenly aware of Cursor’s capabilities and there might be several things in the pipeline.

“I think we’ll all be pleasantly surprised,” he said.

If not for OpenAI’s o1 attempt to save GitHub Copilot, maybe a VS Code update would be able to save it as developers are already happy with what Cursor is doing with OpenAI’s o1.

Maybe, the Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 event on September 16 would mark a new beginning for VS Code and GitHub Copilot.